Tom Carson Reviews Rectify: The Sundance Channel's Close-Enough Bid To Be the Next AMC

Debuting Monday on the Sundance Channel, Rectify is stuck with a title that sounds like a Kickstarter fund for Robert Redford's next colonoscopy. But I guess calling the thing Breaking Good would have been too obvious, and this bid to horn in on AMC, FX and Showtime's scripted-drama turf is actually pretty absorbing. Well, at least whenever the show's far-from-ungifted creator, Ray McKinnon, manages to shake his impression that Albert Camus—as in the French Nobel Prize winner who wrote L'__Etranger, kids—now heads up a powerful voting bloc at the Emmys.

There's a reason why "Sundance-y"—meaning the festival, not the channel, though the same sensibility lurks behind both—is a pejorative term among movie critics. Yet a juicy, enjoyably not-stupid pulp-TV show is pulsing away somewhere underneath Rectify's overthought, finicky vibe. Looking as uneasy as if he's been carved from cold bacon grease and too much sunshine might melt him, Aden Young plays ex-con Daniel Holden, who's spent nineteen years on Death Row when new DNA evidence vacates his conviction for the rape and murder of his high-school sweetie back in the day. In other words, we're being asked to ponder a Big Theme—capital punishment—even as we're kept in suspense over whether Daniel really did the deed.

You get one guess which hook is the grabber. Trying to adjust to the idea of having a future again, Daniel moves back in with his now-remarried mom (J. Smith Cameron) in his down-at-heels Georgia hometown—which is, of course, the one place on the planet where everyone remembers his past. Plenty of his neighbors still believe he's guilty as sin, including the onetime D.A. (Michael O'Neill) who put him away back then and is now a state senator. Overall, the show's conflicts are so prearranged that it's like watching someone try to agitate a chess set into turning lynch mob.

Even for his own kin, Daniel's return is a test of mettle, starting with Abigail Spencer as his sister Amantha. Among other complications, she's been getting it on with Jon Stern (Luke Kirby), the idealistic out-of-town lawyer—read: "hip Jewish guy at odds with redneck Georgia"—who got Daniel's conviction reversed and is trying to prevent the retrial everybody is baying for.

Caught in the middle, much more interestingly, is Daniel's new stepbrother, Ted (Clayne Crawford, who's entertainingly reminiscent of a younger, more expressive Ray Liotta). He's been the heir apparent to the family's tire-store franchise until Daniel gets sprung, and he really doesn't know whether to be kind or cunning. Played wonderfully well by Adelaide Clemens—she's much more vivid here than she was in HBO's groggy Parade's End earlier this year—Ted's wife Tawney is Rectify's most welcome break with cliche: a devout Christian who's neither a hypocrite nor a simp. Nonetheless, since she and Ted aren't too compatible in the bedroom, it's clear to us that her interest in Daniel is at least partly sexual.

She's blissfully unconscious of it, however. Compassion for those in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes is what her Good Book tells her to feel, and she wants to win our not-quite-hero over to Christ. Their conversations are awfully heavy on Cliff's Notes theology: Daniel's had a lot of time to read in prison, so Nietzsche and Thomas Aquinas bob up in his dialogue like dead goldfish for Tawney's big-eyed good will to flush down the drain. But the series deserves some credit for trying to deal with questions of faith unsatirically.

As for Tawney's hubby, his notion of compassion is more earthbound. He tries to help Daniel readjust by buying him a stack of porn mags. Meanwhile, flashbacks to Death Row show us what Daniel was like in his, well, natural environment—not because he was any happier there, just because his hash was already settled and he was used to it.

In different ways, both are symptomatic of how carefully McKinnon has worked out Rectify's themes. Frankly, I could wish he'd been sloppier. The show is at its worst when it's playing like somebody's MFA thesis—its overly studied visual style included—and much better when it's asking viewers to get interested in these people for their own messy, random sakes.

That starts with Daniel himself. Despite Aden Young's skill, his character is loaded down with so many doleful kinds of meaning that you can see the actor's struggle to keep him individual in the way Young grabs at chances to add something playful and wayward to Daniel's scenes with his mom, for instance. As for the crusty old attorney who represented him at his first trial back in the day—and is handed one "philosophical" wheezer after another by the script—I probably don't need to say anything to make your spirits sag beyond mentioning that he's played by Hal Holbrook.

I did keep watching, though, and even felt mildly ticked that reviewers only got the top four eps of Rectify's six-episode run. If you ask me, about half the series is bogus—secondhand, overwrought even in its self-conscious subtlety, and often smug about its insights into human frailty. But the other half is mighty good dark TV. The fun part is that no two viewers are likely to agree about which half is which.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (effective 1/4/2014) and Privacy Policy (effective 1/4/2014).The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Condé Nast.